[Chapter 1: continued from here] ...You've got an interview -- either one that you've arranged with an employer yourself, or one where you've been selected from a thick stack of applicants for an advertised position. Either way, you can congratulate yourself -- you've made it over the first hurdle towards finding new work.

Your resume or letter or whatever other approach you used to make the initial contact with the employer was successful. But mailing out resumes and letters is the simple part of a worksearch campaign. Now comes the real challenge -- direct face-to-face contact.

You've probably been told that an employment interview is where you have to "sell yourself" to an employer. Dozens of authors, counsellors, and consultants specializing in the worksearch process will advise you to think of yourself as a product and to become the sales representative for that product in your meetings with employers.

Unfortunately, they tend to be a bit short on details of what this means.

Thinking of the worksearch process as a marketing campaign is a terrific idea -- if you're a skilled marketer. There are similarities between a sales call and an employment interview. But if you've never been a successful salesperson, telling you to think like one isn't much more helpful than telling you to think like a neurosurgeon. We don't all have a master salesperson hiding somewhere in our brain that we can bring out on cue when someone tells us to think like one.

The employment interview ritual -- you talk, the employer listens

There are significant differences between sales meetings and most employment interviews.